Sleepy Hollow
by Homeslice
Summary: When Riku wakes he will find himself again. [Even if no one else will.] KaixRiku, DavidxJulia, implied HajixRiku, and onesided JuliaxRiku


1Summary: When Riku wakes he will find himself again. (Even if no one else will.)

Disclaimer: I do not own Blood+.

Pairings: Kai/Riku

- - - -

Well you set him on fire

To try to wake him up

But he wouldn't wake up- 'Eskimo', Versus

- - - -

It takes Riku two weeks to figure out that he is no longer human. Somehow it seems offensive, shameful, that the body could be dead, alive, undead– and still not know which one it was before someone told it. He feels betrayed by his flesh, which, though technically, is no different than it was before, because it looks up at him and mouths out everything he wants to hear, but already knows is not true.

- - - -

"When you weren't looking like you were going to wake up, I–..." When Riku asks, curious and bored and still everything that he was but something that he now feels like he needs to grow _out of _(your skin is always stretching, itching-, sometimes when you focus on it enough, it _hurts, _and with it and the mixture of the burning of emotion in your chest licking around your rib cage, you feel like crying, though you often resist), Kai's answer always begins similarly, choked and tightening.

Riku feels it's hold too.

The feeling of the answer at his throat is strangling, suffocating, and he normally ends up falling next to Kai on the bed– it reminds him too much of the feel of when his body hungers for blood, the clenching strain that makes his knees weak. He rests his head on Kai's arm, leaning, realizing again and again that if he can simply sit there, leaning against someone or something, he will be fine.

And all is well again (and again, and again, and again...).

- - - -

"My skin feels like it's going to explode. And my head. And my throat. And my hands." Riku says, watching Haji as he looks out across the vast sea, one hand just barely resting on the bars of the boat-ledge, long and skilled and beautiful– a musician's hands. "Do you feel that way sometimes?"

Haji does not blink, and Riku gets the feel that he had known Riku was there even before he'd spoken. "Yes." he says shortly, but it is enough, neither of them wanting to talk about what they are much more than the other.

When the ocean wind makes their mouths taste like salt, and their hair feels slightly damp from the spray-off and the light trickle of rain, and their nostrils are full of the smell but have yet to adjust so they begin to want to sneeze, they walk inside, both going their separate ways.

When Riku had been allowed to play Haji's instrument on the train, laughing and gleeful, he had not really considered what Haji was, or how it had affected him. He had not known that the hands of the man the cello he had practiced on belonged to would someday become too similar to his to be comfortable.

Those clumsy, inexperienced chords had led to the sleepless nights which had led to the empty stomachs which had led to the aches of two men who did not belong in their skin anymore than they belonged to their species. There is no comfort in the fact that they can relate to each other, not anymore than Kai would get comfort out of keeping the gun under his pillow on the bed– because knowing it was there would not amount to the strain of knowing that it was needed to be there.

- - - -

Later, when his head is buried in Kai's neck and the few moments of hesitation, of a conscience, are gone and spread out over his teeth and tongue in the blood (you are drinking up all that keeps you from kissing him like you need it's strength to control yourself in more ways than the desperation that knots up your stomach, asking to feed), and he thinks as soon as he is done, he will weep.

Kai sobs out something about "He's my _brother_.", and Riku, had he not been so distracted with his _need, _his starvation, he would've flinched.

He is glad he did not– Kai's hand on the back of his neck which can feel everything, from the heavy, thick swallows to the shifts of getting a better angle, would've been able to feel it.

There are some pains Riku is not old enough to be able to hold inside, just as the feeling of wanting to vomit once he pulls away from Kai's neck, feeling sick and perverse and inhuman, and then there are some which he can. What he can do he always makes sure to do properly, and so he twists his wet lips to press together into a line which he deems unbreakable, and then a few moments later they are broken open again with a sob.

Before he quiets, not asleep or unconscious, but as close as he can be– dull, blank, in what he overhears Julia calling as shock–, he catches the glimpses of the horrified faces, blurried but still inexplicably, burningly clear beyond his teary eyes.

He is carried back to the room-, awake, but still not aware, and he makes sure for the sake of himself that he also blocks out the identity of whoever it is holding him.

He has his suspicions. If asked, he could still tell the correct answer, even unwillingly. But Riku is used to unwillingly. He can do unwillingly.

- - - -

"I think my skin's falling off." he tells Julia, and she looks at him over the rising smoke coming from the cigarette in her mouth. She still looks as ladylike and elegant as she always does even with it clenched between her teeth, and he suddenly does not puzzle the reason behind the looks David gives to her when he thinks no one is looking (no one ever thinks you are looking-, because to them, childhood is equivalent to blindness, even though you would much rather tell them that it is their own adulthood which shields them from understanding).

She looks at his skin for a moment, before looking away, removing the cigarette from her mouth to blow and saying "You're fine. I believe it would be understandable for your body to slightly reject the changes that it's going through."

He wants to scream at her, to point at the edges of his fingers and the outline of his forehead and the back of his neck, where he can feel his flesh peeling as they speak. It tugs, and hurts, and he closes his eyes for a moment because he's not tirednottired but he just wants to sleep and sleep and sleep until his life his over, until someone spares him the thought of living any longer and just k_ills _him.

His skin, slightly worried at the thought, curls back up into it's place and he feels like he can smile again without having to worry his mouth will come off– so he does, and Riku has the grace to be embarrassed, laughing to the palm of his hand lightly. "S-sorry. I guess I'm just not myself lately and–," he stops himself, retraces, and his words hit him full force.

He runs back through the hallways to the room Kai and him share, and positions himself backdown, hands straight at his sides.

There is only a point someone so inhuman can reach before they no longer feel the tug of the urge for survival that normal humans do.

His arms ache for Kai, but he doesn't quite mind, because at least it is an ache he _knows_.

- - - -

"Are you okay, Riku? Julia said you just ran out when you visited her the other day." He still has to look up to see Saya's face when she's not sitting down, and he loses his breath for a moment when he remembers that he never will grow to be able to look her eye to eye standing up.

He says he's fine, gives her a reassuring smile, and then later he is abruptly telling her not to hate Kai, not to hate herself, to promise him. He feels distinctly hypocritical, and suddenly does not mind holding Saya's hand, even for the rest of eternity.

- - - -

"Kai-nii-chan," he mumbles, his head torso arms body spread across his brother, and he wants to ask Kai what he thinks of him again, because at least then he'd feel pain, at least then there would be a connection beyond the too-simplistic warmth of Kai's lap, a warmth that can be manipulated, mimicked, disguised (you've convinced yourself that physical things are worthless, just so you can claim that it is really your still-human mind which matters and then deny that perhaps you aren't as human as you'd like there, either).

"Hmm?" Kai only ever sits still like this, when he's hurting. Otherwise he'll always be walking, running, active– Riku's considered the possibility that he only makes Kai feel pain so that he'll sit down. That is the true definition of deriving pleasure from someone else's hurt, but it doesn't seem to matter because somewhere down the line they'll die or be killed and until then they won't have any time to pause and regret it.

They are people who have evolved to not feel regret until the very end-, not at all like Saya, who will grasp her head in her hands as soon as she is done with something, and this is the very reason she's so permanently stained with blood. It is her own fault that she cannot forget.

"What did it feel like watching me, when I was sick?"

He is not given an answer, not even a broken-off one that is split down the middle. Before, Kai had expected Riku to answer nothing. Eventually, he began to expect Riku to answer half ('he's my brother', he'd said, 'and we're so obliged to each other').

Here, Kai has had his tongue eaten out by irony and Haji's tongue is mostly glued to his cheek and Saya's tongue is drowning in the blood of her chewed lips and gums from all that nervousness and hesitation and remembering.

Riku's tongue is loose, but it might just be falling out as he feels all of his skin suddenly slump to the floor, and he does not feel quite as born-again as a man who had just shed his flesh might've been supposed to feel.

There is just emptiness-, shock, and the hope for unconsciousness which is as out of reach as an answer.

- - - -

"I think my skin fell off." Riku says, to Haji this time, and indeed there is a slight peeling of the skin around his index finger but there is nothing else, nothing to prove what he is spewing and screaming like a maddened man.

They watch the ocean together in silence, finding no peace from each other, deriving more calm from the sea than from their nonexistent bodies. They have lost their senses of realities, as soon as they lost their humanity, and all they get in return for their miseries is the slightly bitter taste of sea salt in the back of their brittle throats, hoarse from screaming, and it tastes a bit like melancholy, sitting alone and unwanted on their useless tongues.

"When did you lose yours?" Riku isn't given answer, but he doesn't _need _one.

He is satisfied enough with the question.

- - - -

Julia examines him again two days later, old and new blood samples lined up in neat rows like roses, the smell of Julia's perfume slightly stronger than the smell of the medical center.

The room is locked and quiet, and he stares at the walls with a sense of abandon, lost and found and lost and found again. "Have you been having any trouble lately?" Julia asks, her pen clasped in one delicate hand and bleeding blue ink through the paper where it's tip is resting on (you feel slightly similar to the pen– unlooked and inanimate and pleading), her other hand busied with tightening the cap of one of the blood sample bottles using her thumb.

She looks blank and calm and detached. He cannot understand her for the life of him.

"No," Riku says, "Not at all. Can I get back to Kai now? I bet he's going to worry if I stay too long."

Julia eyes him through her spectacles and behind them her eyes are clear and understanding. He feels violated, shoved, punished-, but not for anything he did not deserve, and her glance hunts for more errors in him, to correct and observe and erase. His skinless body shies away from her, unprotected and naked, but when he looks down at himself, he is fully clothed.

It has been his twenty-third night without sleep. He is not tired.

- - - -

Riku's ear is pressed to the door, his hands balled tightly to his naked-but-clothed chest, which feels strangely emptier than usual.

"I believe it's possible that his body still gives off the symptoms of sleep deprivation even though he doesn't necessarily need sleep–"

"Can't." David's voice corrects. Riku wonders why they're in the same room, but at the same time, he thinks he knows, and it makes him feel vulgar and dirty and he doesn't know why he feels that way.

"...Yes. Can't sleep. But we don't know much about it-, we haven't exactly researched it and I don't think Haji would..."

"I understand." David's voice comes again, deep and stiff and Riku can imagine his wrinkled, aged hands fingering the sheets, twisting uncomfortably. David is always uncomfortable.

Riku is nearly trembling with his own discomfort, but he can't seem to find the strength to move away from the door. It feels like an impossible feat.

- - - -

Riku sometimes feels like people have lost interest in him, because he doesn't sleep, he doesn't need to eat, and there is no reason to care anymore. Before, it might have at least been 'keep him alive', but now it is not, now it is just emptiness and hollowness that has been carved in deeper than the part of Riku's heart that's missing.

Carelessness, unmovedness, that is all that is left for little boys who don't know where they stand anymore– whether by the rails half-heartedly separating them from the endless ocean they're skidding across (skid, whine, skip, and you're back where you started even though you're so far _sofar_), or the uncomfortable beds with the stiff, ironed sheets and white everything that makes him feel like he really has gone insane (and you are just waiting to wake up).

That must be it.

It would make sense that he couldn't get to sleep, if he was already not awake, after all.

He just needs to wait to wake up.

- - - -

Kai's starved looks make Riku think that he has only been eating a little more than Riku, and that is hardly more than anything. His bones look fragile and their aching pulses against his skin– Riku can hear Kai's heartbeat from across the hall, and Kai pauses, a deer trapped between head lights and wolves.

It is not, however, hard to distinguish which of the two Riku is.

"Kai-nii-chan, why have you been avoiding everyone?" Riku's eyes pierce even himself, digging through flesh and flesh and flesh and nerves, and they sever it all, snapping and breaking and picking through what they want to see and what they do not. This is fine by him-, he is fulfilled by his selective blindness, which writhes like kittens sitting atop hot tin, and he figures that if no one is even making an effort to see him anymore, he should not have to bother with making an effort of seeing them _right. _

"I-I haven't, Riku, I've just been..."

"Busy? How much is there to do here, Kai-nii-chan?" Riku feels disgusted with Kai-, the lies are not even believable in the slightest, and Riku, who has been lying and practicing his lies for so long just to make the people around him more comfortable does not understand nor appreciate truth, not even ones which are thinly veiled. "Tell me, Kai-nii-chan. Why? Why have you been avoiding me so much?" He knows his voice is near quivering with emotion, but he is fine with this. The quakes make him feel like his skin is repairing itself, knitting individual cell by individual cell, similar though slower than the process of chiropterans healing after being wounded. It is good not being human.

Kai releases a breath that sounds like he has been holding for weeks, and runs a shaky hand through his hair– it occurs to Riku then that Kai is _scared _of him, frightened, like most everybody else is, and he feels like curling up inside the room who's door he is pressed against, locking Kai out of it even hoping Kai would care enough to even want in. "Because you're not _yourself, _Riku."

For a man who notoriously says 'You are you', the words look ugly and malformed getting thrown away from Kai's lips.

Riku feels like he is melting, no longer solid– prays and prays with his fingers crossed and his eyes squeezed _tightight _until Kai is shaking his shoulders and asking if he's _alright _(and the audacity, it is sickening– those people who ask if you feel okay after they deliberately hurt you, and it makes your stomach twist and your lips purse), and he says, "Kai-nii-chan..."

He is finally able to breathe again. "I think I want to go home now."

- - - -

"So do I, Riku."

- - - -


End file.
